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When you want the orbit of earth around the sun to get higher, earth isn't falling out of orbit, it is raising out of orbit. To get an object in orbit to a higher orbit, you need to add rotation en...
Roaming around interstellar space are rogue planets and rogue stars. These are planets and stars that have been thrown out of the star systems where they were formed. I have seen an estimate that s...
Random and rare: you want it to be an advantage to the species only at those low numbers. Once you have that, evolution will have made the connection to the phenomena that trigger/regulate the proc...
You're going to need a lot of energy. As we'll see in a moment, too much energy to do it quickly. Assuming we want to reduce incoming solar energy by roughly 20% (should lower mean global temperat...
We can look to sickle-cell anaemia for an example. Three quarters of sickle-cell cases occur in Africa. A recent WHO report estimated that around 2% of newborns in Nigeria were affected by sic...
Your right, it is probably a multi-gene combo 2-3 to keep it to a small % the visible variance could be a large piece of the puzzle. The visible items could be very unappealing for sexual partn...
If it is caused by a combination of several otherwise unrelated dominant traits each of which in separation also causes a slight decrease in fertility or increase in mortality. March Ho had an int...
Lagrangian Points A Lagrangian point with what? There are ten different Lagrangian points associated with the Earth, and four of them are stable. The most likely places to get early colonization...
While ckersch's answer is correct on the energy needed there's a deeper issue involved here that I think you are missing: The main part of the energy needed to destroy a planet is the energy neede...
Near a planet. A planet's orbital path will provide a clean bit of space, a star for energy, a way for people to reference the location, and other minor benefits. Put your city in very high orbit ...
This is something that doesn't seem to be mentioned yet, and I'm not sure if it's a problem, but here's what I'm wondering: If the city is alone out in deep space, how would you find it? This is ...
This was originally a comment; so I apologize in advance for anything that got too stream-of-consciousness: Think about what the original purpose of the city was - towns aren't often founded in th...
I think it depends on what 'near' is. If we can travel to Jupiter in a couple days, then almost anywhere in between will be reasonably close. If it takes 6 months to travel to Mars then being in ...
Location location location On Earth, cities developed along harbors, fords and defensible strong points (forts). These are their space equivalents: Home world start point star port. This Lagrang...
Blowing Saturn up would be hard. Saturn has a mass of $568.3\times 10^{24}$ kg, or about 95 times the mass of Earth. To blow up Saturn, i.e. to place some sort of unimaginably huge bomb in its cen...
Converting my comments into an answer: where the city is should flow from why the city is. Real-world cities exist where transportation and geography intersect. Seaports are places to transfer betw...
The other answers have, unfortunately, all been too kind. You cannot affect the tides in any sort of spaceship of non-ridiculous size, you cannot move a spaceship of ridiculous size, and the techn...
Slower than light or faster than light? If you invoke some kind of magical FTL, then the nuances of that FTL will determine everything, and they can be tweaked to produce any results that you desi...
Whether shipping lanes will appear depends almost 100% on whether it is profitable to shipping companies to use shipping lanes. Shipping companies, due to their slim margins, are very dependent on...
Too long for a comment. TL;DR Whatever you do, that effect has to be pretty strong. Explanation: If you have three moons, the tides (depending on the moons' trajectories) might be very chaotic, ...
The simplest answer would be to not have the legs fused at all. Underwater they would hold the legs together and swim using long flippers/flukes on the end. On land they would curl up the flippers/...
Since moons affect tidal patterns on planets using gravity; I would say that's what we would have to focus on as a spaceships only means to affect tides on a distant planetary body. Obviously, a ...
I can think of two uses for gravity generation aboard a spacecraft. The first is environmental, keeping crew and components from floating around while the ship is outside of a planet's gravity wel...
If the effects of the tides are significant, and the spaceship inhabitants are observing the planet, it's likely that they would know that they are influencing the tides of the planet. However, if ...
A complete answer to this question needs to consider both electricity supply and demand. As far as I can see the existing questions only cover supply. In terms of supply, the main kinds of generat...